Anonymous Vows to Avenge Loss of Demonoid by Reviving It

Anonymous has vowed to revive Demonoid, a popular torrent sharing and tracking platform shut down by authorities last week, and to extract vengeance on the the forces it holds responsible for the takedown.

Demonoid was hosted on servers at a data center in Ukraine which local authorities raided last week, leading to the site’s shutdown.

Anonymous began its effort, codenamed #OpDemonoid, on Wednesday by launching Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks against several Ukrainian government-owned websites, knocking them offline for a short period of time. DDoS attacks involve overloading a website’s host server with bogus traffic, and are relatively easy to perform compared to more intricate cyberattacks.

Anonymous’ longer-term goal is restoring Demonoid by asking members to host mirror sites across the world, creating what the group called in a release an “open-source Demonoid.”

According to the BBC, the Ukrainian raid on Demonoid was requested by the Mexican government through Interpol, an international organization that allows police from different countries to coordinate with one another. Authorities there had previously been pursuing a member of Demonoid’s staff.

However, the site was on a list of services suspected of engaging in copyright infringement that was drawn up by United States authorities, and the Ukrainian operation coincided with a visit by that country’s vice prime minister to the United States. The United States also has a history of asking foreign police to assist in intellectual property arrests, as was the case in January’s arrest of Megaupload’sKim Dotcom in New Zealand.

Those factors have led some, including Anonymous, to conclude that the Ukrainian Demonoid raid was the brainchild of the American entertainment industry.

“The action was spearheaded by the usual cabal of lobbyists, SOPA/ACTA supporters, and their bribed politicians,” reads an Anonymous release. “We question what the motives for this action really are? It is clear to us that politics and lobbyists are again getting in the way of progress.”

Anonymous said that its mission to restore Demonoid will “require time and patience.”